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War On Cryptocurrencies

War On Cryptocurrencies

Posted Jan 12, 2018 9:18 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: War On Cryptocurrencies by Garak
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

If a cryptocurrency ever becomes acceptable for everyday usage (think “grocery shopping”), it's unlikely to be Bitcoin because Bitcoin can't handle the transaction volume. It is running up against hard limits even now even though hardly anyone is using it. Similar issues apply to other “mined” cryptocurrencies.

I don't think the comparison to Linux makes a lot of sense because at the end of the day Linux is just a software program, and in principle anyone can write a software program, especially if one is doing it in one's spare time and can't go bankrupt doing it. Especially when it was new, Linux wasn't doing anything, on a technical level, that others weren't doing already. Bitcoin, OTOH, is trying to break entirely new ground and whether it is a great idea to waste the energy budget of small European nation states enabling an infrastructure that, for the most part, powers ransomware and drug deals on the Darknet remains to be seen.


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